The effect of artificial intelligence-assisted reading strategies instruction on middle school students' strategy use level and reading comprehension success

The aim of this thesis is to expand the strategy use levels and reading comprehension skills of middle school students through the teaching of artificial intelligence-assisted reading tactics. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the Copilot artificial intelligence scan, accessed via the WhatsApp platform, in the reading method teaching process. The research was prepared for the 7th grade enrollment stage at Şehit Recep Eşiyok Middle School in Bayburt city center during the 2024–2025 academic year. A total of 60 students from classes 7/A and 7/B were included in the study. In the research, a pre-test–post-test control group, quasi-experimental design was used, consisting of 60 students (30 experimental, 30 control). The data for the research were collected through the Detailed Reading Comprehension Strategies Scale (DRS) by Kırmızı (2008) and the Reading Achievement Test (RAT) stored by Taşkın and Sallabaş (2022). In this study, a usable t-test was used to compare the pre-test and post-test scores of the control and experimental groups. To determine the significance between groups, the independent variables t-test was used. Pearson distribution analysis was also applied to examine the relationships between variables. The findings from the pre- and post-test applications were first processed in Microsoft Excel, and then further analyzed using SPSS 26.0. According to the analyses obtained, it was concluded that teaching artificial intelligence-assisted reading strategies under the conditions of this study had positive effects. This is logically supported by the fact that the mean post-test scores related to strategy use in the experimental group (M = 3.6000) were significantly higher than those in the control group (M = 3.3987) (p = 0.001). Similarly, reading comprehension success levels were found to be significantly higher in the experimental group (M = 21.3000) compared to the control group (M = 18.9667) (p = 0.002). These findings indicate that teaching AI-assisted reading strategies has positive effects on improving students' reading comprehension performance.